Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Huttig, AR

Huttig is a second-class city in Union County, located just two miles north of the Arkansas–Louisiana state line.

Huttig was established as a timber-industry company town by the Frost-Johnson lumber interests, anchored by the Union Saw Mill Company, whose first pine mill began operating in 1904 after the company began building the town beside the mill site in 1903.

Company president C. D. Johnson named the town for his friend William Huttig, a St. Louis industrialist and investor.

Huttig incorporated on May 16, 1904, and quickly became the largest sawmill community in Union County — and the county's second-largest city until the south Arkansas oil boom of the 1920s.

The company built houses for its workers and provided schools, stores, a community house, and a hospital, and the town was served by its own newspaper, the Huttig News.

Huttig was deliberately segregated by design: its white and Black neighborhoods were of about equal size, were separated by a twenty-five-acre reservoir, and each had its own stores, schools, and churches.

Huttig was the childhood home of civil rights activist Daisy Bates, who went on to mentor the Little Rock Nine, and of pianist Floyd Cramer, famous for the hit "Last Date."

Fires struck the Huttig mills in May 1921 and October 1933, but a new sawmill opened in 1934, and a plywood mill was added in 1971.

Huttig remained a company town until the 1950s, when Olin Industries sold off its town properties to residents.

The city's population peaked at 1,386 in the 1930 census and has declined with the timber industry; the 2020 census counted 448 residents, down from 597 in 2010 and 731 people in 282 households in 2000.